MIRACULOUS LONGING

WRITER: RICHARD BURGUET

Iwould venture to guess every one of us — at least once — has come to a place in our life where we needed a miracle. We long for help, intervention, or divine change in difficult, agonizing moments. When the problems in life are outside of our own ability to bring about change — when we realize we are powerless to resolve our problems — these are the places where we think the only solution would be a miracle. I have known even the most independent, autonomous, self-reliant people brought to the metaphorical cliff’s edge to yearn for a deity to enter space and time and alter circumstances that are out of human control. I believe this is why men, who might have never uttered a prayer in their life, call out to God when faced with death.

We need miracles in this life.

Why?

Because in this life, we are students with full course-loads and part-time jobs who, just a semester away from finishing college, find out another three-hour class is required. We are the expectant couple receiving the news that the pregnancy is about to miscarry. We are young parents hearing news that an infant daughter “is not doing well, and we are going to have to rush her into the ICU to save her life.” We are people who answer phone calls in the middle of the night when the voice on the other end says, “I have something really difficult to tell you....” We are people living in times like these. We need some kind of supernatural intervention to take place.

These life events will and do inevitably play out. Sometimes the unlikely, the hoped for, the happy-ending happens. Other times, those things we dread the most intensely come to fruition.

Those with a positive, prayed-for outcome to dire circumstances might claim they have “witnessed a miracle!” Those whose prayers ended in grief are left with unresolved disappointment and questions.

Did a miracle occur?

In one sense, the answer lies in the definition of miracle These days, the definition of a miracle can be very loose so that it includes anything wonderful that happens. People will even attribute miracles to no source in particular. It’s as if miracles just

“For this reason, the question whether miracles occur can never be answered simply by experience. Every event which might claim to be a miracle is, in the last resort, something presented to our senses, something seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted. And our senses are not infallible. If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say. What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. It is therefore useless to appeal to experience before we have settled, as well as we can, the philosophical question.”

— C.S. Lewis, “Miracles”

happen. Poof! Like magic. I believe miracles are wonderful experiences in life where something is brought out of nothing — like the birth of a child. I look at conception and birth and believe that apart from the power of a God to create life and spirit in the womb, there is no explanation for how it could otherwise happen. Definitions aside, I believe miracles stem from a source — a true, living, and active God.

But there are many people today who want miracles, who long for them and even call out and request them, that are reluctant or unable to accept an ordered source or deity over these humanly unexplainable events. We are a proud people, slow to give up the power in our lives — hostile toward the thought that there might be a governing authority in this universe besides ourselves. We want the miracles, just not the God orchestrating them.

However, I don’t believe miracles exist without a source. I believe we all — every one of us — intrinsically long for miracles because we long for a source. Do you long for a miracle?

Have you asked yourself why?